Ask for meeting notes in this exact shape, every time

"Summarise this meeting" is the single most under-specified prompt in daily use. It gets you a paragraph that reads fine and tells nobody what to do next. The fix isn't a smarter model - it's a fixed structure you ask for every single time, so the output is actually usable instead of just accurate.

The shape that works:

• Decisions made - what was actually agreed, stated as a decision, not a discussion point.
• Owner and deadline for each action - not "the team will look into it." A name and a date, or it isn't an action, it's a hope.
• Open questions - what got raised and specifically not resolved, so it doesn't quietly disappear because the meeting moved on.

Ask Copilot for exactly that - "decisions, actions with an owner and date each, and open questions, as three separate lists" - against the transcript or your own notes, and compare it to whatever "summarise this" gave you last time. The difference isn't the model being smarter. It's that you finally told it what a useful output looks like instead of letting it guess.

One thing worth checking before you send it on: did every action actually get an owner, or did the model quietly invent one because you asked for the format and the meeting itself never assigned one? That gap is real information - a decision with no owner is a decision that won't happen, and it's better to catch that in the notes than three weeks later when nothing's moved.